By Azeem Ibrahim, a Research Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Member of the Board of Directors at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and Chairman and CEO of Ibrahim Associates. Follow him on Twitter @AzeemIbrahim.
This week, Hilary Clinton expressed America’s fears about what the defence cuts would do to British military standing. She is on record as worrying that “the more our allies cut their capabilities, the more people will look to the United States to cover whatever gaps are created."
Nor is she alone in feeling that way. General Casey is a former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, who has commanded at every level from platoon to Division. When I met him a few months ago, he said that in light of future threats to US, Europe and the West in General, he was concerned to see that European countries were reducing their defence budgets across the board.
This should give the cutters pause. Serious figures from the military and diplomatic establishment of our closest ally – America – are prepared to abandon diplomatic niceties and express their concern about the direction we are taking.
It is already clear that there is no military or strategic rationale behind this decision. The Strategic Defence Review was supposed to be about assessing the potential risks to Britain and its interests, and then deciding what the government needed to spend to guard against them. Instead, it is, to an almost insultingly transparent degree, about saving us money.
Cutting the forces cuts our world political clout. Our UN Security Council seat becomes ever less defensible. At the same time, by weakening our own military capabilities, we would weaken the value of our alliances, and thus our friendship. With a seriously weakened military, come 2020, why should a young democracy in Iraq, for example, seek our friendship over that of, say, Iran or India? What could we offer? With a seriously weakened military, come 2020, if Pakistan splintered and its nuclear arsenal hung in the balance, what could we contribute to defend ourselves from its falling into the hands of groups tied to the perpetrators of 9/11? When we weaken ourselves militarily, we weaken ourselves politically.
This week Hillary Clinton’s intervention reminds us of the most damaging aspect of such a decline: weakening our value as a military partner to the US. There is mounting evidence that the US no longer takes the UK seriously as a military partner.
The other arguments against these egregious cuts are well established.
They would deprive us of industrial capability which we may never get back, stop us from keeping our word with our friends and from enforcing the rules which protect us, and continue to expose our men and women in the field to needless harm. They would weaken us going into any war for resources, withdraw us from the strategic picture in Asia for a generation, and push our ailing military prowess into yet more decades of decline. It will undermine our position in world affairs, and hurt our ability to protect the safe passage of the heat and light we take for granted, the goods we buy at the supermarket, and the food on our plates.
They would, in short, be folly. If the US Secretary of State can see that, why can’t our own Prime Minister?
